#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Sen. John McCain, independent voice of the GOP establishment, dies at 81
Labels: politics
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has declared Germany “is a nation of immigrants and will remain so”, asserting: “There are no half or whole Germans, no biological or ‘new’ Germans”.This tends to raise an obvious question. If the USA, Great Britain, Sweden, and now Germany are all "nations of immigrants", to what nation do all of these immigrants originally belong?
Speaking at Berlin’s Bellevue Palace, where a small group of people with Turkish heritage had been invited to share their views on immigration, integration, and xenophobia in Europe, the German president strongly denounced “exclusion of and discrimination against people with foreign roots”.
Telling guests of his regret at hearing people with migration backgrounds report incidents which they claimed made them feel they don’t belong in the country, Steinmeier claimed prejudice undermines “all the things we have done together as a country”.
“There are no Germans who are ‘on probation’ and having to earn their rights in society again and again because their [citizenship] could be revoked on the basis of alleged misconduct,” the president said, insisting that there are “no half or whole, no biological or ‘new’ Germans; there are no first- or second-class citizens, no right or wrong neighbours”.
Labels: history, immigration, trainwreck
Many on the left and the right gave a loud cheer last week when Alex Jones was banished from Facebook. Twitter later suspended him. While it is not surprising to see the jackals on the left cheer at the burning of books, one would hope folks on the right would look in the mirror and realize their time is coming soon. The leftists will not stop (and did not stop) at nutty Alex Jones, because they do not think you are much different from him. You rightly think your belief in immigration enforcement is much different than his disgusting conspiracy theory about Sandy Hook. But you must understand the left thinks you are both equally vile. They just knew Jones was the weak member of the herd. They could pick him off as a test run. Next they’re coming for you.In fairness, conservatives have not defended the national economy, the national borders, or even the ladies rooms. So, it's really not surprising that they aren't willing to defend Alex Jones.
But we didn’t get a unified message of support from the pinky-out people on the right. We were scolded for defending Jones. They sang so sweetly into the left’s ears: “Alex Jones is icky. And there is no slippery slope. And you should frankly be censored anyway, if you don’t at least have a Master’s degree.”
The same people who ceded control of public education, the federal bureaucracy, the media, movies, and music to the left have once again found another hill not worth dying on. “It’s only social media,” they say. Yeah, fear not. Around 2.5 billion people use Facebook and Twitter. What’s the worst that can happen if we just let the left have them?
Labels: cuckservative, decline and fall, technology
Labels: sports
Just in case no one let you know already, Jordan Peterson is getting researched in the Qanon board and it includes references to your videos.I won't be even a little bit surprised if something deeply sketchy surfaces once the chans dig deep enough. The man's guilt is literally etched on his face. I don't know what it is that he feels so guilty about, but this might be an indication.
Pedophile ring theory in Cornwall, Ont., will likely continue to swirlBut we know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that an array of government officials and agents have been conspiring against Trump. We have the emails and text messages. We know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the Vatican hierarchy conspired for decades to protect its gay pedophile priests. We have the indictments, confessions, admissions, and apologies. So, how does malevolence somehow cancel out stupidity?
By: Allison Jones, THE CANADIAN PRESS
16/12/2009 7:08 PM
TORONTO - It's been more than 10 years since allegations that a pedophile ring operated in eastern Ontario first made national headlines.
And long after the dust has settled from the tome that is the Cornwall inquiry report some will continue to believe in a conspiracy to cover-up the truth, experts and observers say.
Commissioner G. Normand Glaude concluded Tuesday that children were sexually abused by people in positions of authority and that public institutions failed victims by mishandling complaints dating back to the 1960s.
But many were looking to him to lay to rest a more sinister explanation for those events, that it was the work of a pedophile ring and a cover-up that reached all the way to the Attorney General's office was at play.
He did not, saying in his 1600-page report that he would not make an unequivocal statement about the theory either way.
For some, it may not have mattered.
An explanation that to some appears to debunk a conspiracy theory just further confirms others' suspicions, said University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson.
"It's very difficult to disprove a conspiracy theory, because every bit of disproving evidence can be just written off as additional evidence that these conspirators are particularly intelligent and sneaky," he said.
Conspiracy theories are usually started by people who are very untrusting and it gathers steam among others who are somewhat untrusting, Peterson said.
They're psychologically compelling because they neatly tie together troubling facts or assertions, he said. When things go badly there are often many explanations, and an orchestrated conspiracy "should be pretty low on your list of plausible hypotheses," Peterson said.
"A good rule of thumb is: Don't presume malevolence where stupidity is sufficient explanation," he said.
"Organizations can act badly and things can fall apart without any group of people driving that."
While Glaude made no definitive statements about a ring, he declared there was not a conspiracy by several institutions to cover up the existence of any such operation, rather that agency bungling left that impression.
Psychology professor Jordan Peterson explains the method small children start to explore the world – quite similar to the voyages of Star Trek. This excerpt is part of his comprehensive lecture “2017 Maps of Meaning 9: Patterns of Symbolic Representation” at the University of Toronto:Jordan B Peterson@jordanbpeterson
Labels: conspiracy, Jordanetics, mailvox
I have an above average intellect and have big problems dealing with co-workers. I call them out, pointing out their mistakes and errors. This has caused the loss of more than one job due to 'upsetting' those in charge. Now I find myself being accused of all sorts of bullying and ridiculous charges by people who are either plain stupid or ignorant. Just mentioning facts they consider embarrassing is 'problematic'. I'm sure you have set yourself up where you don't have to deal with morons anymore on mass, but what did you do when you you weren't in such a position?(facepalm)
Labels: mailvox
So true! I used to visit with a young man whom I'd see off and on. He was always scarfing up the self-help books. He was in his late 20's, but lived with his parents, didn't even own a car, had to use his brother's truck. His parents even paid for him to attend a self-help conference somewhere for a week and he would propound on the ideas ad infinitum if you'd let him, but he never became self-sustaining or able to support himself to this day. I saw him a couple of weeks ago at a bus stop and gave him a ride and he is still at it.Talk-talk may be better than war-war, but it is no substitute for act-act. The thing is, if you stop and think about it, there is absolutely no reason that therapy or self-help books should make any difference whatsoever to the average individual, given what we know about the inability of information to transform the rhetorical mind.
Labels: Darkstream, mailvox, philosophy
In the ongoing and ever-losing battle with my own personal dragons of pride, I took to wondering: why is the proud man angry or peeved with the stupidity (real or imagined) of his fellows? I ask because one would think a saint would be very patient with someone who was stupid, if it were honest stupidity, and not merely laziness in thinking. Whereas the devil (or Lex Luthor) is always in a state of haughtiest annoyance, because he is brighter than those around him. Their stupidity proves his superiority – yet it irks him. Why?I think there are different reasons that irk different people. Speaking only for myself, I truly don't mind people being stupid or being absorbed in interests that I consider to be stupid, pointless, or uninteresting. Let's face it, I consider the average individual to be almost unfathomably stupid, if not actually retarded, and that doesn't anger me any more than the fact that Spacebunny's Ridgeback can't work out differential equations. That being said, I do get extremely annoyed when one of the great masses of my intellectual inferiors takes it upon himself to attempt to correct me, almost invariably incorrectly, and in a manner that indicates that he didn't even begin to understand what I wrote or said.
Labels: philosophy
CNN anchor Chris Cuomo claimed on Wednesday evening that it is “offensive” for President Donald Trump to mention that Mollie Tibbetts has been “permanently separated” from her family after an illegal alien murdered her. Referring to Trump’s White House video about Tibbetts, Cuomo wondered whether “these sympathizers would be as full throated about these tragedies if the killers were white citizens, if the victims were not young white women.”All I can say is that it won't surprise me if American families began hunting down immigrants in retribution for the murder of their children. And pro-immigration politicians.
In the White House video, Trump says: “Mollie Tibbetts, an incredible young woman, is now permanently separated from her family. A person came in from Mexico, illegally, and killed her. We need the wall. We need our immigration laws changed. We need our border laws changed. We need Republicans to do it because Democrats aren’t going to do it. This is one instance of many. We have tremendous crime coming trying to come through the borders. We have the worst laws anywhere in the world. Nobody has laws like the United States. They are strictly pathetic. We need new immigration laws. We need new border laws. The Democrats will never give them… So, to the family of Mollie Tibbetts–all I can say is God bless you, God bless you.”
Labels: decline and fall, immigration, law
Where I looked out our van’s window at a landscape of skeletal cows and chartreuse rice paddies, Keller saw a prehistoric crime scene. She was searching for fresh evidence that would help prove her hypothesis about what killed the dinosaurs—and invalidate the asteroid-impact theory that many of us learned in school as uncontested fact. According to this well-established fire-and-brimstone scenario, the dinosaurs were exterminated when a six-mile-wide asteroid, larger than Mount Everest is tall, slammed into our planet with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs. The impact unleashed giant fireballs, crushing tsunamis, continent-shaking earthquakes, and suffocating darkness that transformed the Earth into what one poetic scientist described as “an Old Testament version of hell.”“I would argue that the hypothesis has reached the level of the evolution hypothesis.”
Before the asteroid hypothesis took hold, researchers had proposed other, similarly bizarre explanations for the dinosaurs’ demise: gluttony, protracted food poisoning, terminal chastity, acute stupidity, even Paleo-weltschmerz—death by boredom. These theories fell by the wayside when, in 1980, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez and three colleagues from UC Berkeley announced a discovery in the journal Science. They had found iridium—a hard, silver-gray element that lurks in the bowels of planets, including ours—deposited all over the world at approximately the same time that, according to the fossil record, creatures were dying en masse. Mystery solved: An asteroid had crashed into the Earth, spewing iridium and pulverized rock dust around the globe and wiping out most life forms.
Their hypothesis quickly gained traction, as visions of killer space rocks sparked even the dullest imaginations. nasa initiated Project Spacewatch to track—and possibly bomb—any asteroid that might dare to approach. Carl Sagan warned world leaders that hydrogen bombs could trigger a catastrophic “nuclear winter” like the one caused by the asteroid’s dust cloud. Science reporters cheered having a story that united dinosaurs and extraterrestrials and Cold War fever dreams—it needed only “some sex and the involvement of the Royal Family and the whole world would be paying attention,” one journalist wrote. News articles described scientists rallying around Alvarez’s theory in record time, especially after the so-called impacter camp delivered, in 1991, the geologic equivalent of DNA evidence: the “Crater of Doom,” a 111-mile-wide cavity near the Mexican town of Chicxulub, on the Yucatán Peninsula. Researchers identified it as the spot where the fatal asteroid had punched the Earth. Textbooks and natural-history museums raced to add updates identifying the asteroid as the killer.
The impact theory provided an elegant solution to a prehistoric puzzle, and its steady march from hypothesis to fact offered a heartwarming story about the integrity of the scientific method. “This is nearly as close to a certainty as one can get in science,” a planetary-science professor told Time magazine in an article on the crater’s discovery. In the years since, impacters say they have come even closer to total certainty. “I would argue that the hypothesis has reached the level of the evolution hypothesis,” says Sean Gulick, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the Chicxulub crater. “We have it nailed down, the case is closed,” Buck Sharpton, a geologist and scientist emeritus at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, has said.
But Keller doesn’t buy any of it. “It’s like a fairy tale: ‘Big rock from sky hits the dinosaurs, and boom they go.’ And it has all the aspects of a really nice story,” she said. “It’s just not true.”
While the majority of her peers embraced the Chicxulub asteroid as the cause of the extinction, Keller remained a maligned and, until recently, lonely voice contesting it. She argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978 and then abandoned by all but a small number of scientists. Her research, undertaken with specialists around the world and featured in leading scientific journals, has forced other scientists to take a second look at their data. “Gerta uncovered many things through the years that just don’t sit with the nice, simple impact story that Alvarez put together,” Andrew Kerr, a geochemist at Cardiff University, told me. “She’s made people think about a previously near-uniformly accepted model.”
Keller’s resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous and longest-running controversies in science. “It’s like the Thirty Years’ War,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and attempts to torpedo careers.
Musk has indeed prioritized volume production, and his failure is due to his arrogance. This arrogance is typical of Silicon Valley as a class. They assume they know better than any other industry, failing to realize their success is due to monopoly and lack of regulation (welcome to the auto industry boys!).(nods) On a much smaller scale, it's fascinating to see how people keep trying to launch new publishing companies on the basis of one or more successful books, then crashing and burning because they don't understand that assembling the right infrastructure is considerably more important than the product.
Labels: banks, books, technology
Two people have been killed and one seriously injured after a man, reportedly wielding a knife, carried out an attack in a Paris suburb. Security forces have “neutralized” the attacker. Police killed the assailant on Thursday morning after he attacked people in the street in the Trappes commune, not far from Versailles. Local media said the attacker – a man born in 1982 – was armed with a knife and barricaded inside a pavilion shouting: “Allahu akbar, if you enter I will blast you all.”Eventually, it is going to cross someone's mind that while welcoming and celebrating diversity has led to all of these rapes and murders and other various and sundry unpleasantries, terminating and eliminating it would solve all of those problems efficiently and permanently.
The attacker was previously known to security services and was listed on the national security threat list, known as Fiche S, for incitement to terrorism, according to local media reports.
Labels: EU, immigration, Vibrancy is our strength
David Brown has never felt a connection to his own name. “To me, Brown means nothing,” said the 49-year-old finance professional, who lives in Manhattan. “There is no heritage, there is no Jewishness. There is nothing.”There is nothing wrong with ancestral pride. There is nothing wrong with men and women showing the faith and the soul of their people has not changed. What is wrong is the pretense that they ever were, or ever could be, Americans. What is wrong is the pretense that the interests of their people were ever the same as those of the American people. The observable truth that is no longer even remotely deniable is that these Fake Americans and their children are no more Americans now, or in the future, than they are still Poles, or Russians, or whatever their previous skinsuit happened to be.
So, in June, Brown began legal proceedings to change his last name to Broner — the original surname of his late father, Nechemia — as a way to pay homage to the family’s ancestry. Broner, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, changed his name to Charles Brown after arriving in New York in 1950, seeking acceptance from Americans.
David’s children Jonathan, 12, Sarah, 10, and Isabella, 8, will also have their last names changed to Broner. (His wife, Maria Gonzalez-Manes, 52, uses her maiden name.)
“I always told my children about my father’s story, and how important it is to keep tradition . . . they understand it and they like it,” said Brown. “Being the son of a Holocaust survivor, [this] is an easy way to show the faith and the soul of the Jews have not changed.”
Waves of 19th- and 20th-century immigration brought millions of new Americans through Ellis Island — many of whom, in an effort to assimilate into new communities and professions, changed their names to ones that sounded more American. Now, in an about-face, more and more of those immigrants’ descendants are reverting back to their original surnames to show ancestral pride.
Labels: immigration, nationalism
Labels: philosophy, science
Labels: Jordanetics, Voxiversity
Labels: anklebiters, Voxiversity
In their search for the mysterious killer who is wreaking havoc on the crime lords of Chicago, Agent Justice of the FBI and Detective Callahan of the Chicago Police Department recreate a gun battle that took place at a restaurant in Chinatown. What they learn leads them to the killer's next target, where they find themselves face-to-face with the ruthless, relentless being itself.A study by researchers at the University of Western Australia found that women did not want exceptionally clever or handsome men. But the same did not hold true for men – who are not put off by extreme levels of intelligence or good looks, they found.Being in the top one percent of intelligence myself, and having been friends with a male Calvin Klein model, I can attest that as far as women are concerned, there can definitely be too much of a good thing. I remember one very attractive girl who was - to my point of view, inexplicably - focusing her attention on me rather on than my much better-looking friend explaining that she wanted to be the pretty one in the relationship.
Researchers asked hundreds of people what they found attractive in a potential romantic partner. Participants rated four qualities – good looks, cleverness, kindness and being easy-going.
They were asked to say how attracted they would be to potential partners who were, for example, kinder than 1 per cent of the population. They were then asked the same for 10 per cent, 25 per cent, 50 per cent, 75 per cent, 90 per cent and 99 per cent of the population. For each percentage, participants rated the partners on a six-point scale from ‘extremely unattracted’ to ‘extremely attracted’.
The results showed that the more the quality was present, the more attractive the person was as a partner – most of the time. But for females, partners lost their appeal at the top of the scale for some traits.
Women said a partner would be more attractive if they were more intelligent than 90 per cent of the population. However, attractiveness decreased if the person was more intelligent than 99 per cent of the population. The same drop-off was seen for physical attractiveness and being easy-going, according to the findings published in the British Journal of Psychology.
Labels: Alpha Game, women
Labels: cuckservative, history, politics
Would conservatives achieve an easy victory against the left if it came down to civil war? The question seems less absurd by the day as tensions increase between the right and left. Many conservative writers seem to think the left would fold quickly and the right would triumph. One has good reason to doubt that. Consider basic issues like political bias in universities, or religious integrity. After decades of exposés and outcries from conservatives over liberal tyranny, universities are as biased as they ever were....If you look at the history of ideologically-based civil wars, the odds most certainly do not favor the more conservative sides. The Spanish Civil War was one of the few in which the socialists were ultimately defeated, and yet, neither Franco nor the Phalange were ever embraced by the Right throughout the West.
I am nowhere near as confident as Kurt Schlichter that the right wing could trounce the left wing in battle. We can't even unite to keep Alex Jones on Facebook. It is true that conservatives have more guns and are probably better street fighters. But conservatives also cave in large numbers even when their most sacred cows are in danger – such as the First Amendment or Christian principles. The two latter issues sit at the core of academic bias and debates on sexuality, respectively. I have the war wounds from both battles and can attest to the repeating scenario: conservatives talk and talk about what they believe and how bad the left is. Then they give up droves when it comes time to fight.
Take the question of defending the gospel. We hear constant sermons from Christian preachers that speak of standing by God's word even in the face of popular criticism. In anticipation of the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting, I spent months searching for people be willing to sign on to a resolution affirming Christian sexual ethics and supporting churches' rights to offer counseling in defiance of laws like California's "stay gay" bill. Almost sixteen million Americans claim to be Southern Baptists. I could not find a single person willing to back the resolution. When I submitted it under my own name, it was killed in committee and never brought to the floor.
Labels: cuckservative, decline and fall, war
Labels: Darkstream, Voxiversity
A confidential, 49-page memo for defeating Trump by working with the major social-media platforms to eliminate “right wing propaganda and fake news” was presented in January 2017 by Media Matters founder David Brock at a retreat in Florida with about 100 donors, the Washington Free Beacon reported at the time.Relying on the left-wing big social platforms is inherently fragile. Get off Twitter and Facebook, get on Oneway for public stuff and Idka for private groups. Edit Infogalactic instead of Wikipedia. Getting anti-fragile is the key to future success. I'd rather have 10k followers on BitChute than 100k on YouTube, but a 20k email list would be better than either.
On Monday, the Gateway Pundit blog noted the memo’s relationship with recent moves by Silicon Valley tech giants to “shadow ban” conservative political candidates and pundits and remove content.
The Free Beacon obtained a copy of the memo, “Democracy Matters: Strategic Plan for Action,” by attending the retreat.
The memo spells out a four-year agenda that deployed Media Matters along with American Bridge, Shareblue and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to attack Trump and Republicans. The strategies are impeachment, expanding Media Matters’ mission to combat “government misinformation,” ensuring Democratic control of the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections, filing lawsuits against the Trump administration, monetizing political advocacy, using a “digital attacker” to delegitimize Trump’s presidency and damage Republicans, and partnering with Facebook to combat “fake news.”
Quashing ‘fake news’ with ‘mathematical precision’
The Free Beacon in its January 2017 story said Brock sought to raise $40 million in 2017 for his organizations.
The document claims Media Matters and far-left groups have “access to raw data from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites” so they can “systemically monitor and analyze this unfiltered data.”
“The earlier we can identify a fake news story, the more effectively we can quash it,” the memo states. “With this new technology at our fingertips, researchers monitoring news in real time will be able to identify the origins of a lie with mathematical precision, creating an early warning system for fake news and disinformation.”
Media Matters met with Facebook, which boasts some 2 billion members worldwide, to discuss how to crack down on fake news, according to the memo.
The social media giant was provided with “a detailed map of the constellation of right-wing Facebook pages that had been the biggest purveyors of fake news.”
Brock’s memo also says Media Matters gave Google “the information necessary to identify 40 of the worst fake new sites” so they could be banned from Google’s advertising network.
The Gateway Pundit pointed out that in 2016, Google carried out that plan on the Gateway Pundit blog and other conservative sites, including Breitbart, the Drudge Report, Infowars, Zero Hedge and Conservative Treehouse.
Facebook, meanwhile has changed its newsfeed algorithm, ostensibly to combat “fake news,” causing a precipitous decline in traffic for many conservative sites.
Labels: #AltTech, law, technology
Last night's Hugo Awards ceremony featured a significant first: Nora Jemisin became the first novelist in science fiction history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugos, once for each volume in her Broken Earth trilogy (the concluding volume, The Stone Sky, won last night's prize); in addition to the unprecedented honor, Jemisin had another first, with her acceptance speech, which may just be the best such speech in the field's history.Let's consider the best speech in the science fiction field's history by the greatest science fiction writer of all time.
Other works and creators honored last night include:
Best novella: All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)
Best novelette: “The Secret Life of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, September 2017)
Best short story: “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™,” by Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex, August 2017)
Best related work: No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Best Graphic Story: Monstress, Volume 2: The Blood, written by Marjorie M. Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image Comics)
Best Editor – Short Form: Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
Best Editor – Long Form: Sheila E. Gilbert
oh um okay so I I had started developing this whole superstition where I only went Awards if I don't show up and my friends are texting me so I can't read my speech stop okay all right so let me get to the speech this has been a hard year hasn't it a hard few years a hard century for some of us things have always been hard and I wrote the broken earth trilogy to speak to that struggle and what it takes to live let alone thrive in a world that seems determined to break you a world of people who constantly question your competence your relevance your very existence I get a lot of questions about where the themes of the broken earth trilogy come from I think it's pretty obvious that I'm drawing on the human history of structural oppression as well as my feelings about this moment in American history what may be less obvious though is how much of the story derives from my feelings about science fiction and fantasy then again science fiction and fantasy are microcosms of the wider world in no way rarified from the world's pettiness or prejudice but another thing that I tried to touch on with the broken earth trilogy is that life in a hard world is never just the struggle life is family blood and found life is those allies who prove themselves worthy by actions and not just talk life means celebrating every victory no matter how small so if I stand here before you beneath these lights I want you to remember that 2018 is also a good year this is a year in which records have been set a year in which even the most privileged blinder of us have been forced to acknowledge that the world is broken and needs fixing and that is a good thing stop texting me and that is because acknowledging the problem is the first step towards fixing it I looked at science fiction and fantasy as the aspirational Drive of the zeitgeist we creators are the engineers of possibility and as this genre finally however grudgingly acknowledges that the dreams of the marginalized matter and that all of us have a future so will go the world soon I hope fairies and yes there will be naysayers I know that I am here on this stage accepting this award for pretty much the same reason as every previous best novel winner because I work my ass off I have poured my pain onto paper when I could not afford therapy I have studied works of literature that range widely and dig deeply to learn when I could and refine my voice I have written a million words of crap and probably a million more of me and beyond that I have smiled and nodded while well-meaning magazine editors advised me to tone down my allegories and my anger I didn't I have gritted my teeth while an established professional writer went on a 10-minute tirade at me and basically as a proxy for all black people for mentioning under-representation in the sciences I've kept writing even though my first novel The Killing Moon was initially rejected on the assumption that only black people would ever possibly want to read the work of a black writer I have raised my voice to talkback over fellow panelists who tried to talk over me about my own damn life I have fought myself in the little voice inside me that constantly still whispers that I should just keep my head down and shut up and let the real writers talk but this is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers every single mediocre insecure wannabe who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage but people like me cannot possibly have earned such an honor and that when they win its meritocracy but when we win its identity politics I get to smile at this people and lift a massive shining rocket-shaped finger in their direction I'm understand so how many of you all saw like Panther okay probably my favorite part of it is actually Kendrick Lamar theme song all the stars the chorus of it is this maybe the night that my dreams might let me know all the stars are closer let 2018 be the year that the stars came closer for all of us the stars are ours thank youMoving. Deeply moving. (wipes a solitary tear away) You lift that massive shining rocket-shaped finger to the sky, you inspiring token for the savagely untalented! No one can ever take away those unprecedented three consecutive Best Novel Awards from you, although they're desperately going to want to do so once they realize just how completely they have destroyed the credibility of their own awards.
I have not read the Jemison books. Perhaps they are wonderful works of science fiction deserving of Hugos every year from now on. But in her graceless and vulgar acceptance speech last night, she insisted that she had not won because of 'identity politics,' and proceeded to disprove her own point by rehearsing the grievances of her people and describing her latest Hugo as a middle finger aimed at all those who had created those grievances.But that's what the Hugo Award is now. And that is all it is. Which is exactly what I told the Rabid Puppies would happen. Our actions could never have sufficed, but their reactions did.
Labels: Hugo Award, Puppies, trainwreck
The South African government has begun the process of seizing land from white farmers.Farm seizures today, mass starvation tomorrow.
Local newspaper City Press reports two game farms in the northern province of Limpopo are the first to be targeted for unilateral seizure after negotiations with the owners to purchase the properties stalled.
While the government says it intends to pay, owners Akkerland Boerdery wanted 200 million rand ($18.7 million) for the land — they’re being offered just 20 million rand ($1.87 million).
“Notice is hereby given that a terrain inspection will be held on the farms on April 5, 2018 at 10am in order to conduct an audit of the assets and a handover of the farm’s keys to the state,” a letter sent to the owners earlier this year said.
Labels: decline and fall, Vibrancy is our strength
Labels: Darkstream, decline and fall
Salvanto’s polling currently indicates that few House seats will change hands in November — and that the GOP could very well hold its majority in the House. “In this era, a district’s voting patterns from the past tend to stay that way,” Salvanto said. “Not as many partisans today are willing to cross party lines.” Of the nation’s 435 House districts, fully 85 percent will almost certainly stick with its current party affiliation come November, Salvanto projects....I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Republicans only lose single-digit seats. To be honest, I wouldn't even be shocked if the GOP wound up picking up seats if the God-Emperor delivers another positive surprise or two before November.
“Right now I think this election looks like a toss-up,” Salvanto said. “We see a Democrat pickup in the House of Representatives in the 20-odd seat range, but Republicans could certainly hold on to the House.” The GOP holds a slim 43-seat House majority, with six vacancies.
“Even though Republicans have not fared well in special elections so far this cycle, it does look like they will be turning out for the midterms,” Salvanto said. “So far we do not see a large number of Republicans saying they will flip and vote for a Democrat.”
GOP voters in the past have been much more likely than Democrats to turn up and cast ballots in midterm elections, regardless of each party’s enthusiasm level ahead of Election Day.
So Democrats are literally betting the House on their ability to capture large numbers of voters who don’t normally vote in midterm elections.
Labels: music
Labels: Book Review, Darkstream, science, war
President Trump on Saturday issued a tweet-storm following the removal of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his InfoWars shows from most major social media platforms earlier this month.Fortunately, we are informed that despite being Leftist, Twitter, at least, does not act on the basis of beliefs or political ideology.
“Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices,” the president wrote in the first of several tweets. “Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen.”
The president did not indicate what steps his administration might take to prevent private companies from setting up and enforcing terms of service that have allowed them to discipline or shut down accounts for reported abuses.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Saturday that he "fully admit[s]" Twitter employees share a largely left-leaning bias after facing accusations that conservatives are discriminated against on the social media platform. In an interview that aired Saturday on CNN, Dorsey said his company has a responsibility to be open about its political viewpoints, but to operate without bias when applying content policies to users.Well, that's certainly nice to know, Jack. So when can I expect my Twitter account to be restored?
"We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is...is more left-leaning," Dorsey says. "But the real question behind the question is, are we doing something according to political ideology or viewpoints? And we are not. Period," he added.
Dorsey went on to insist that his company only polices behavior on the platform, not content.
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Among all generals, Napoleon had the highest WAR (16.679) by a large margin. In fact, the next highest performer, Julius Caesar (7.445 WAR), had less than half the WAR accumulated by Napoleon across his battles. Napoleon benefited from the large number of battles in which he led forces. Among his 43 listed battles, he won 38 and lost only 5. Napoleon overcame difficult odds in 17 of his victories, and commanded at a disadvantage in all 5 of his losses. No other general came close to Napoleon in total battles. While Napoleon commanded forces in 43 battles, the next most prolific general was Robert E. Lee, with 27 battles (the average battle count was 1.5). Napoleon’s large battle count allowed him more opportunities to demonstrate his tactical prowess. Alexander the Great, despite winning all 9 of his battles, accumulated fewer WAR largely because of his shorter and less prolific career.It's more an entertaining experiment than a serious statistical analysis, but I suspect the incredible tactical success it assigns to Napoleon is much more reflective of the French general's strategic brilliance than anything else. In like manner, the Israeli generals appear to be overrated due to the low quality of their opposition; if I recall correctly, it was Dayan himself who said that the key to his military success was the fact that he was fighting Arabs.
However, outside of Napoleon’s outlying success, the generals’ WARs largely adhere to a normal distribution. This suggests his success is attributable to command talent, rather than an anomaly in the model’s findings. In fact, Napoleon’s total WAR was nearly 23 standard deviations above the mean WAR accumulated by generals in the dataset.
There were also generals that had surprisingly low total WAR despite a reputation as master tacticians. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate States Army, finished with a negative WAR (-1.89), suggesting an average general would have had more success than Lee leading the Confederacy’s armies. Lee was saddled with considerable disadvantages, including a large deficit in the size of his military and available resources. Still, his reputation as an adept tactician is likely undeserved, and his WAR supports the historians who have criticized his overall strategy and handling of key battles, such as ordering the disastrous ‘Pickett’s Charge’ on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg. In the words of University of South Carolina professor Thomas Connely, “One ponders whether the South may not have fared better had it possessed no Robert E. Lee.”
German field marshal Erwin Rommel, nicknamed the ‘Desert Fox’ for his successes in North Africa during World War II, also performed poorly in this model, finishing with -1.953 WAR. This finding disputes the praise Rommel has received as a tactician from modern generals, including Norman Schwarzkopf and Ariel Sharon. However, like Lee, Rommel has been the subject of considerable historical debate. In particular, critics have attributed much of his reputation as a tactical genius to both German and Allied propaganda. British generals reportedly exaggerated Rommel’s tactical abilities in order to minimize disapproval regarding their defeats.
Modern generals performed relatively poorly in the model. American general George S. Patton, described by historian Terry Brighton as “among the greatest generals of [World War II],” accumulated only .9 WAR. The failure of modern generals to perform well in WAR may be attributable to changes in warfare which have prevented individual generals from participating in a large number of battles.
Among post-World War II generals, Israeli commanders stood out. Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan finished with 2.109 WAR (60th overall), an impressive amount for a modern general but relatively modest compared to pre-20th Century tacticians. Similarly, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accumulated 2.171 WAR (58th overall) for his battlefield successes in the Suez Crisis, Six-Day War, and Yom Kippur War.
